Philosophy Changes In Child Welfare

State Commissioner Talks About Putting Safety First

April 26, 1997

Change doesn't happen overnight.

Those words have become a familiar mantra from the state Department of Children and Families over the past two years in response to a series of child-abuse deaths involving children known to the agency's social workers.

Rayquan Rogers, a Hartford toddler severely beaten, allegedly by his mother's boyfriend, is the latest tiny victim. Neighbors say social workers failed to act on their repeated complaints that the child was in danger.

The incident, and others like it, have occurred despite a court consent decree signed in 1991 that flooded the child-welfare agency with money to hire 500 social workers.

In an interview this weekwith reporter Valerie Finholm, state Children and Families Commissioner Linda D'Amario Rossi spoke about progress at the agency, which she took over two years ago. She declined to comment on the Rogers case, which remains under investigation by the department.

Q. We keep hearing that change doesn't occur overnight. It has been six years since Connecticut signed a consent decree that more than doubled your agency's budget and vastly increased its staff. Why do children keep falling through the cracks?

A. The fact of the matter is, change really doesn't occur overnight. There has been a fundamental change in philosophy [under Rossi and the Rowland administration]that the safety of children is first. Preserving families is important but we need to ensure the children are safe. That means sometimes we need to remove children while we preserve families. Culturally, we need to change some of the thinking of our social workers. For example, I believe that some of the staff have felt that they need to keep families together -- that families are not capable of killing or hurting their kids. I remember very clearly at a staff meeting someone standing up to me and saying that we really didn't have the right to ask a mother who slept in her house and do a criminal check on that person.

Q. How has the job of the social worker changed since previous administrations?

A. Public child welfare work today is about assessing a family, deciding if the child is safe or not safe, deciding whether to remove the child or put services into the family. The services are by and large all purchased from private sector agencies. The job of the social worker is really a coordination of the services -- it is not treatment. We don't sit down with you and fix your drug abuse problem. If you have a drug abuse problem we send you to a private agency to treat you for drug abuse.

Q. Do you feel constricted in doing your job by requirements of the consent decree?

A. The consent decree was wonderful. It gave us so many resources. [But] the folks that were instrumental in putting the consent decree mandate together were folks who, I believe, thought that if you could just treat every child, we'd fix all of these problems. Four years later, when the resources came and everything was settled, guess what, the world out there had changed. Drugs and violence had become an everyday part of public child welfare work. That wasn't the case in the times when we would say: ``If we could only give Jimmy's mother a parenting class, everything would be fine.''

Q. What are some shortcomings of the court decree?

A. One is the requirement that you can only hire social workers with a degree in social work or a related field. That limits your pool [of job candidates] right there. I wanted to use criminal justice as a related field. There are some retirees from police departments that some states have had some very good experience with hiring. The consent decree denies that. We are the single agency in Connecticut that has done more hiring, more promoting than any other state agency. But we have a limited pool of people we can hire from. I had someone who came here from Massachussetts who worked for 10 years in the state of Massachusetts as a child protection investigator but had a degree in education. I could not hire her because education doesn't count as social-work related.

Q. What are some of the problems you have had with hiring so many new people?

A. We've hired a lot of people in a very short period of time. We've had an infusion of people who don't know what they're doing. We have been forced to hire [because of the consent decree]. In the past two to three years we've had to hire 300 to 400 social workers [each year], to say nothing of every time we hire five social workers we have to create one additional supervisor. So now you've bumped a social worker to a supervisor who may have just become a social worker a year or two ago.